Earlier this year, Facebook reaffirmed its status as a bonafide Internet giant when it broke ground on its first data center, which will be located in Oregon with plans to begin operations in 2011. Today, the company has announced that it’s building its second data center, this time in Rutherford, North Carolina. And it’s not coming cheap: Facebook is investing $450 million to build the new facility.
According to a press release issued by North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue, the project is expected to take 18 months to complete, and will have around 35-45 full-time and contract workers once it’s done. The release also notes that “additional construction phases may be possible in the future, depending on business needs”. In other words, if Facebook continues its rapid growth, it’ll still have some room to stretch its legs.
The release also touts the technology going into making the new data center as energy-efficient as possible, and states that it will use “technologies developed by Facebook to rely on fewer than half the computing power (and energy related energy consumption) that a similar data center would have required” a few years ago.
Facebook isn’t the first tech company to turn to North Carolina to build a massive East Coast data center — Apple is building a $1 billion facility that’s expected to be finished this year. Google and IBM also have data centers in the state.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for...
Sponsored Ads
Sponsored Ads
Sponsored Ads
San Francisco, CA
